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A Complicated Gift

Looking like a beat poet or a heavy-lidded hustler, in jeans, disintegrating T-shirt and black leather jacket, Adam Guettel surfaces in the rare Seattle sun after a morning at the keyboard, his fingers actually bleeding. ''Lovely, don't you think?'' he asks, holding them up for inspection. He has been struggling to write a complicated new song this week -- also, depending on how you look at it, for three months or four years; four years is how long he's been working on ''The Light in the Piazza,'' a musical based on Elizabeth Spencer's 1960 novella. There's a dramatic hole at the heart of the story, and it needs to be filled soon because the show is about to open in previews. But difficult as the assignment may be, passionate as Guettel's writing process is, that's not what has done the damage to his hands. He's done the damage. With his teeth.

Later, indoors, he will demonstrate some of his other nervous habits, which may qualify, he cheerily admits, as obsessive-compulsive tics. ''I don't enjoy turning on or off a light switch without being slightly off the ground,'' he says, hopping on one foot. Then he shows me how pencils and other objects on his desk must be aligned along inscrutable axes only he can perceive. ''And of course I have to put my knee into the corner of a room.'' He does so, and laughs, as if at the antics of a not-quite-funny but tolerated drunk.

Envious souls, which is to say most everyone involved in the theater, might be glad to find this apparently superfortunate human reduced to weird marionette behaviors. And Guettel is a test of your tolerance: how talented, charming, wealthy and ''maddeningly good-looking'' (as his mother puts it) is it fair for one person to be? Among all the young composers working so hard (and so much more prolifically) to make a moribund art form sing, why is it Guettel who is dubbed the musical theater's crown prince and savior? That he is the most accomplished composer among them -- the most interesting lyricist too -- only makes it worse. That ''Piazza'' is such a brilliant property for musicalization is also galling. People are envious of Guettel not just because he gets the acclaim, but also because he deserves it.

The odd thing is that Guettel resents the acclaim (and the presumption of deserving it) almost as much as anyone else. The savior-of-the-musical mantle, however well it fits, also burns; he's constantly clawing at it, tearing it off. The ragged fingers and all the rest are part of that story. Spend a minute with him -- it takes only one -- and a picture of the terror behind the tics starts to emerge. A simple terror, at first: the superstitious habits began when, as a boy soprano singing Yniold in ''Pelléas et Mélisande'' at the Met, or the middle spirit in New York City Opera's ''Magic Flute,'' he was desperate to keep his voice from the looming precipice. ''The fear was of cracking,'' he says. It still is.

Glad to Be Unhappy,'' with music by the miserable Richard Rodgers and words by the tormented Lorenz Hart, is one of Guettel's favorite songs. It is also a birthright. Rodgers was his maternal grandfather. Unhappiness is his raw material. And if the anguish and ameliorations of art are an old story, there's a reason we're still interested in why creative types suffer. Or how they suffer, anyway. Some try to eat their piano-playing fingers, some cut off their ears, some stash liquor in the toilet tank to ensure access to oblivion. That last was Rodgers: arguably the greatest American composer, and inarguably an alcoholic, a womanizer, an all-around tyrant. The wayward Hart did everything possible to get away from him when he couldn't face the music. Even Rodgers's piano seemed desperate to escape: according to his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel, who is Adam's mother, it flew from under his importunate fingers as he sat there composing during a California earthquake.

Seventy years later, Guettel perfects his own means of escape -- emotional, technological, aesthetic. He calls himself a ''method'' composer, meaning that he burrows deeply into his characters' lives and, among other delaying tactics, stores reams of earnest notes on his Palm Tungsten W. ''Loving him is having him be not what you would have him be but a harbinger of your truer next self,'' reads one. ''Looking forward to love is just a fat line of cocaine.'' Like those sentences, the two works on which his reputation so far hangs seem almost willfully obscure. It would be hard to imagine either of them ever playing on Broadway, or Guettel wanting them to. ''Floyd Collins,'' a critical success at Playwrights Horizons in 1996, is based on the true story of a man trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925. ''Myths and Hymns'' -- more a cycle of art songs than a musical -- was inspired by Greek mythology and an 1886 Presbyterian hymnal. Neither piece reflects in any obvious way the life he knows. He was raised in the almost chokingly sophisticated precincts of the Upper West Side, a cultural Brahmin and a (nonpracticing) Jew. When asked how his last name is pronounced, he says it rhymes with ''shtetl.''

Despite their unlikeliness, both works are extraordinary, authentic creations. Every youngish theater composer (Guettel is 38) must nod to Sondheim, and many genuflect so deeply that their spines turn into S's. But Guettel acknowledges the master in a privileged, unslavish way, as befits a lifelong family friend. The rhythmic inventiveness and restless harmonies are duly saluted, but in the supple long lines of the gorgeous melodies, it's Rodgers you hear on top. And more surprisingly, Oscar Hammerstein you hear in the words. Not that they are ever square or pedagogic. Guettel's lyrics, which he grudgingly (and sometimes incompletely) transforms into English from a litany of place-filling ahs and las and dicka-dicka-dums, are like Hammerstein's only in that they are openhearted and direct, relentlessly subjugating cleverness to craft. Rhyme is kept simple and wordplay subtle (''Went lookin' fer his fortune under the ground/Sure enough his fortune is what he found'') so that ''Floyd Collins'' sounds like Kentucky, not Turtle Bay.

All this careful constraint results in songs that course with raw, even threatening, feeling. They are often two to three times longer than standards: Guettel doesn't circle beauty balefully but pounces on it and feasts, wringing the last life from it. He seems to know there will be more, and this confidence -- a kind of lordliness even -- turns out to be crucial in addressing the listener's pleasure. This he does at least as consistently as any of his ''New Music Theater'' contemporaries, while maintaining a level of adventurousness that would impress most of his elders.

''I don't hesitate to put him up there with the best,'' says Arthur Laurents, who is Guettel's godfather but would not let that stop him if the opportunity for criticism arose. ''He's emotionally free in his lyrics and in his music, certainly more so than Steve.'' Sondheim himself listed ''The Riddle Song'' from ''Floyd Collins'' -- almost nine minutes of unimpeded joy -- among those he most wishes he'd written himself.

But if ''Floyd Collins'' was, as John Simon put it, ''the original and daring musical of our day,'' it wasn't because of the joy. As with all the projects Guettel chooses, and agonizes over until you'd think they'd bleed like his fingers, it offered a kind of proving ground on which to detonate his most devastating fears. In this case, the fear was that his work, however good, would come to nothing: that he was himself trapped underground, his song echoing around an otherwise empty chamber. The subtext was his connection to Rodgers -- something he doesn't talk about much in public. (He even asked the Intiman Theater, where the premier production of ''Piazza'' is playing through July 19, not to mention Rodgers in its press releases.) Nevertheless he tells me that in letting the trapped caver find peace at the end of ''Floyd Collins,'' he was unconsciously shifting the weight of his legacy to bear it better. ''To fail in the pursuit of something noble,'' he says, on a good day, ''is itself noble.''

As it turns out, though, legacies are not so easily shifted. Which may be why, as you track Guettel's work since the success of ''Floyd Collins,'' the terrain remains rocky. ''Myths and Hymns,'' a kind of musical 12-step program, questions the possibility of redemption for sins against God, against other people and against one's own soul. (In one semiautobiographical song, a man abandons his pregnant girlfriend as she is about to have an abortion.) Produced theatrically as ''Saturn Returns,'' it sealed the composer's reputation -- while making that reputation harder to read. ''What's next for Mr. Guettel?'' asked Stephen Holden in his 1998 Times review. ''Another folk musical? An opera? Either or both are possible. The talent is there, and it's major.''

For a while it looked as if those questions might never be answered, as Guettel struggled with various demons and various writers (including Laurents, Alfred Uhry and finally Craig Lucas) to put ''Piazza'' together. The longer it took, the more it was anticipated, until at some point the show began to seem like a myth itself. But ''Piazza,'' even in its imperfect first incarnation, turns out to be a real, ravishing work, a romantic chamber musical whose subject (love) and setting (Italy) provide Guettel with an entirely new palette of colors to blend, albeit in his characteristic bravura style. What is instantly recognizable everywhere is the darkness encroaching on the bright surface; ''Piazza'' is as mottled with chiaroscuro as the artworks so admired by its protagonist, a resourceful American matron on vacation with her strangely childlike 26-year-old daughter. Though to Lucas (who is also directing the Seattle production) the main story is the mother's unexpected triumph in securing her daughter's happiness, to Guettel it's something so sad I can hardly square it with the debonair man who's telling me his version. Which is: a child of enormous privilege, damaged in some profound but secret way, wonders if that damage is so great that it will forever preclude the possibility of love.

''I was fascinated with drinking and drugs from as young as I remember,'' Guettel says. ''Including pretending to get a hangover, smoking leaves off trees, sniffing mimeographed tests. When I first got high, when I was 13, my memory is that I shared a joint with a raccoon; that's how intense it was. It was the happiest moment of my life.'' He smiles brilliantly, then lets the smile wilt. ''Still is.''

Guettel and I are walking up Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, toward a prospect he assures me is worth it. I am gasping, but only in part from the climb. His history with drugs is disturbing -- marijuana at 13 is one thing; cocaine at 14 is another -- and can't be dismissed as a rich kid's insufferable debauchery, even though some of the stories are painfully literal iterations of the theme of abusing his good fortune. Once, flying back to Exeter from New York, where he'd gone to sign papers regarding his grandfather's will, he scalped his Eastern Shuttle coupons for drug money and was beaten bloody in the process. That scared him clean for two years, but gradually, at Yale, where he felt isolated and unhappy, he slipped back into pot and mushrooms and pills.

And alcohol. ''After I graduated and was living in Brooklyn, I started drinking regularly at night, and smoking pot, and then cocaine happened again in my mid-20's. By the time I was 27 I was in recovery, but not authentically. The New York production of 'Floyd' happened when I was sober, but then I was in a car accident, herniated two discs and was given a Percocet. Soon I was taking 25 to 30 a day. I was an abject, drug-addled wretch, shades drawn, not eating, watching TV all day. Within six weeks I was in rehab again. Then came almost four years of sobriety, during which I finished 'Myths and Hymns,' put it on at the Public Theater, did some documentary scores and also wrote the first three or four songs for 'Piazza.' And then someone offered me Vicodin.

''In the last three years I've been in rehab twice, but basically it's been a pretty rough ride. Right now I have 69 days clean, and I have to keep going to meetings regularly or I know I will be doing drugs again. I'm playing Russian roulette. I don't know what would happen if someone offered me some kind of alcohol, if there were drugs at a party. And because of the matrix of drugs and sex. . . . '' He trails off, sighing.

There are many ways a legacy can turn out to be a burden, and Richard Rodgers's legacy to his heirs has succeeded at all of them. The gap between his secret reality and the beautiful world of his very public art almost swallowed up everyone standing nearby. Possibly as a reaction, his daughter Mary Rodgers Guettel has developed a personal style you might call knee-jerk transparency, except that you do not need even a tiny rubber mallet to get the goods from her. When I arrive at her Upper West Side apartment, she has already prepared a dossier of Adamic memorabilia: prep-school report cards, early compositions, joke photographs of the kind you'd usually burn, letters of filial love and apology. Her husband, Henry Guettel, helpfully provides a large manila envelope in which to transport the trove.

There is no trove large enough, though, to document the sheer too-muchness of this family. Too much talent, too much pain. It is, finally, a theatrical family, and not just because the living room features Jo Mielziner's watercolors of his sets for ''Pal Joey'' and ''Pipe Dream.'' The Guettels' very lives seem to be part of a master ironist's dramatic design. Or a master melodist's: Rodgers, dead almost a quarter century, still rakes in millions of dollars a year for his heirs and magnetizes them so completely with his monumental achievement that even if they turn away -- and despite their own achievements -- their very cells continue to align with him.

Nothing Adam Guettel does can therefore be seen in isolation from his family. Even ''Piazza.'' It was his mother who suggested that he musicalize the story -- but not before having suggested the same thing, back in the 60's, to her father. ''Daddy told me it was lovely, but not for him,'' she says now; Rodgers soon went on to write, with Sondheim and Laurents, his own American-in-Italy love story, the underrated ''Do I Hear a Waltz?'' But why didn't Mary Rodgers (as she was professionally known) compose ''Piazza'' herself? She had, after all, written the fine music for ''Once Upon a Mattress,'' among other shows. ''I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent,'' she says without self-pity. ''I was not my father or my son. And you have to abandon all kinds of things.'' So somewhere along the way she let her theatrical career slip away in favor of young-adult fiction (the ''Freaky Friday'' series) and the chairmanship of the Juilliard School. Not to mention motherhood. From her first marriage there were three children; from her second, to Guettel, himself a lifelong man of the theater, another three, all boys: Adam in the middle between Matthew and Alexander.

Painful things are dispensed so freely here, in such smart, neat proportions, that they might as well be martinis. Mary says that Adam seemed to come into his own for the first time when his brother Matthew, who had been sickly for nearly all of his four years, died of asthma. Until then, Adam had been quiet, picky, morose; desperate to get him to eat, they'd been reduced to letting him graze at little bowls of cut-up food they set on the kitchen floor. But after seeing his brother taken away, something changed. ''He came downstairs in his Doctor Dentons that evening,'' Mary recalls, ''and started clowning around, poking people in the face, which was such a sudden personality change. As if he knew the meaning of what had happened, and now people would notice him or give him a chance. It was also right after that, after Matthew died, that Adam one day started singing 'The 59th Street Bridge Song' -- note perfect. He was not yet 2.''

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Guettel publishes his work under the corporate name Matthew Music; if death was the beginning of his voice, vice was not far behind. Which is more precocious: that at age 11 he could sing before 3,800 people at the Met, his style lovely, his French impeccable? Or that he had started smoking Chesterfields at age 7? The push-pull of maturity is a recurring motif. When he was 13, just as he was about to star in the Met radio broadcast of ''Pelléas'' and a television movie of ''Amahl and the Night Visitors,'' his voice, despite the years of superstitious habits, finally broke. Or did it? ''I kind of faked that my voice was changing,'' he says now. ''I probably could have sung those roles, but I didn't want to handle the pressure, which has some resonance as the beginning of my adult life.''

The botched opportunity was also a boon, diverting his musical impulses toward composing. He wrote his first pieces around age 14. While working on one of them, he was asked by Rodgers to play it louder; though the old man said he liked it, Guettel discounts the compliment: ''He was literally on his deathbed on the other side of the living-room wall.'' Still, the baton was passed, and the boy took off fast. ''For the first year he wrote, I could advise him,'' his mother recalls. ''Tell him things like, 'The ear likes to know where the harmonic home is, so try to get back there.' After that, he was so far beyond anything I could ever have dreamed of, I just backed off.''

By the time he returned to New York after college, in 1987, having gritted his teeth through theory and composition, Guettel was a very promising young composer, with a 20-minute concerto for jazz quartet and symphony orchestra already to his credit. But by then he was also an addict.

Though his drug use has only been whispered about in theater circles, Guettel's reputation as a Lothario has been bruited almost proudly. Even his father told me, not exactly censoriously, about the dozens of ''lovely, spurned ladies spread all over the pavements of Manhattan'' -- one of whom supposedly wrote a musical about him, featuring a number of embittered ex-girlfriends. His mother sharpened the point: ''I mean, let's face it, he has the sexual proclivities of a satyr. Or of his grandfather.''

It seems that even in his worst traits Guettel will always be compared with Richard Rodgers, who bedded any chorus girl he could get his hands on. ''I know I've hurt a lot of women, and I feel terrible about it,'' Guettel says. ''It's easy to get away with things when you have money and people think you're attractive. Also when you're verbal and have ready access to silken prose, which only sometimes reflects what you're really thinking. I hope that phase is over. Because there's a point at which, being unhappy for too long, you become irrevocably unkind, like my grandfather. I'd like to be happy, if only to be able to be kind.''

He seems happy enough as he says this; still, having seen him perform his songs in concert, I know how he works an audience. Charm goes a long way but, like money, is often misspent. Guettel admits as much. ''Competence,'' he says, ''is the only real antidote for how I feel most of the time.''

But it's a sunny day in Seattle, and the Queen Anne prospect, once we reach it, is spectacular. ''Maybe I'm just on the local instead of the express,'' he says, referring not just to love but also to the hope of straightening himself out for good. ''It takes a long time to admit that you have this problem, that it's a terminal illness. I've risked my life so many times now, in cars where I can barely see, doing cocaine and drinking and driving, with a stick shift on the Taconic. And it's never over. Because it's not just a disease; it's me, it's knowing how much I could do if I kept it together, if I had the courage and stamina and willpower! I wish I could just have fun and relax and not have the responsibility of that potential to be some kind of great man! In my family, to be good is to fail. To be very good is to fail. To only do three really good things is to fail. The only thing not a failure is to be great. And that'' -- he shuts his eyes -- ''is tiring.''

So this is what comes of ''Edelweiss'' and ''You'll Never Walk Alone.'' All that joy and solace -- admittedly some of it the gift of Hammerstein's words -- passed on like a giant rock to be carried up ev'ry damn mountain. If his grandfather's trust has allowed Guettel to make his art carefully, to work on each project for years without having to write jingles or wait on tables to pay the rent in between, it has also financed the death-defying addictions that every day threaten to crack his voice forever.

I ask him to tot up the losses.

''Oh, I've lost jobs,'' he sighs. ''I've lost a good 20 percent of my singing ability by frying my voice with alcohol and cigarettes and pot. But the big thing I've lost is time -- I think, conservatively, 10 years of writing, because it's 16 years since I got out of school, and I was gainfully employed for only six of them. Which actually makes me fairly quick as a writer, contrary to my image.''

True enough. We descend the hill, trying not to tumble, and Guettel gets back to work on the missing song. So far, it exists only as a jumble of musical motifs and fragmentary lyrics on his computer, filed under the apt (if temporary) title ''Falling.''

The song wasn't ready for the first-night preview I saw on May 31 -- it went into the show 10 days later -- but I assume I will hear it when ''Piazza'' comes to New York after a production, this winter, at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. If it comes to New York. The economics of serious chamber musicals, on Broadway or off, are not easy to square. When I first asked Guettel about the possibility of ''bringing in'' what he calls his ''tender little experiment,'' he said: ''I don't care. I've got a trust fund'' -- which was, in part, defensive. He does care. But he also recognizes that New York may not be a viable option for every project, not at the risk of someone else's $5 million. Even in Seattle, the Intiman has bet the farm (''and some of the livestock,'' says Laura Penn, the theater's managing director) on a production that, at $1.1 million, is three times as expensive as its typical show.

What Guettel really wants is for the work to be good, and then for it to have a future. He doesn't deny that a New York production would help further both goals; New York is where he and his collaborator, Tina Landau, polished ''Floyd Collins'' to a high gloss and where it received the kind of acclaim that translates into heavy listening and licensing. (The Rodgers & Hammerstein Theater Library, which unsurprisingly handles the production rights to Guettel's works, has licensed 40 North American productions of ''Floyd Collins'' in four years, making it, according to Theodore Chapin, president of the R&H Organization, the ''Oklahoma!'' of the New Music Theater set.) But what a show seeking a future really needs is to be recorded and to have its score published -- both of which seem certain to happen for ''Piazza.'' What's unclear is whether anyone other than the superior singer-actors that Lucas and Guettel have assembled will ever be able to perform it.

Anyone can whistle a happy tune. But take a look at the score of ''Piazza.'' To create its highly chromatic, yearning atmosphere (Guettel calls it faux-Lisztian), the harpist is kept so busy changing pedals that she's basically doing a clog dance. The other instruments -- piano, violin, cello, bass -- aren't spared, either. The vocal lines are compulsively notated down to the last crotchet, specifying the kinds of inflections and back-phrasings that other composers would leave to the singers' sense of style. It's not pedantry; it's how Guettel hears, and in some sense tries to stabilize, his damaged world. Is ''Love to Me'' -- the romantic climax of the score -- less heart-melting because it is set mostly in the compound time signature of 5/8+4/8? No, it is more so, thanks to that strangely limping extra eighth-note, which seems to argue that imperfection can be another kind of beauty. But just try learning it without Guettel's longtime music director, Ted Sperling, hammering out the beats.

What few can learn, few can love. ''I can't help that,'' Guettel says. ''We can finally admit, confidentially, that being a prominent theater composer is like being a prominent manuscript illuminator. So let's not ask people to think more of this art form than they want to.'' Which seems a shame because, with enough tinkering, ''Piazza'' could be a classic. The main strengths of the novella are retained, and in many places enhanced by Lucas's comedic gifts. Beyond that, the story has pulled from Guettel half a dozen of the most convincing and beautiful new theater songs I've heard in a long time. They are surprising and at the same time not so; ''Love to Me'' may be in an abstruse meter but, beneath its skin, as if genetically programmed, it has conventional A-A-B-A bones. If a good melody is, in Guettel's phrase, a dense packet of information that unfolds over time -- something you can put in your pocket, carry lightly and open as needed -- ''Piazza'' is a pocketful.

''There is a nexus of three things that makes a song reach into the world,'' Guettel says. ''The writer's craft is one; his soul is another. And the third is the thing that no one has control over: the times. Grandpa was in the right place at the right time. He thought about the right things, even if he wasn't the most enlightened person personally. And he had perfect control of his technique. A simple song like'' -- he can't remember its name, but he means ''Do-Re-Mi'' from ''The Sound of Music'' -- ''will never be forgotten. And I have to believe it is possible to write songs today that will be as universally comprehensible in our time as those songs were in theirs.''

Another inherited burden. And yet, on my last day in Seattle, Guettel relates a dream he once had about his grandfather: ''I was walking him to an elevator. I asked him if I was any good. He said, rather kindly, 'You have your own voice,' and the elevator doors closed.''

I take Guettel's telling me this to mean that, despite profound ambivalence about the family business, he is resolved to carry it forward -- in his own way. His next project, a shockingly ambitious concert piece for Audra McDonald, will make all his previous risks seem like, well, ''Do-Re-Mi.''

Though the day ''Piazza'' plays its first preview is only his 70th day of recovery, Guettel is making plans as if he will get to 700 and beyond. It does seem to be a good sign that he has stopped hiding -- not just the painful truths of his life, but the more painful hopes. I also take it as an omen that ''Piazza'' has a happy ending, albeit (as Guettel insists) an ''off-axis'' one: the child, never learning how she was damaged, gets to marry her Italian suitor. Musically, the ending is less ambivalent; the mother's farewell song, after a turbulent 125 measures, resolves with a delicate and transparent figure in peaceful C-sharp major. Those last bars sound, I can't help thinking, like the golden sky at the end of the storm, suggesting the hope, however Hammersteinian, that if the ear can find its way home, so can we all. At the same time, though, the curtain is falling -- it's a brilliant stage picture -- between parent and child, as if to add that finding the way home can sometimes mean leaving it for good.